"It was Grainger's antidote to being a superstar virtuoso pianist," said Sir Jonathan Mills, a composer and the curator of the Melbourne Festival's Cultural Collisionsprogram.

"I think he was trying to say that music could be so much more than the confines of the concert hall."

As part of Cultural Collisions, replicas of Grainger's original music machines have been commissioned for the public to play and interact with at the Percy Grainger Museum in the Melbourne suburb of Parkville.

Among them is an enormous mouth organ-type instrument, where a large wooden leaver pushes wind to create a strange, wheezing skronk.

Across from the giant mouth organ sits a theremin-like device and a piece of plastic sheeting that whirrs with an electric frequency when contact is made with its grooves.

"He thought that a universal application of science and sound was exactly what the music industry needed," said Mills.

"These weird instruments were precursors to things that are pretty widespread today, like analogue and digital synthesisers."

One part of the exhibition shows all the peculiar items Grainger hoarded for potential use in future music machines.

There's a bit of PVC piping and cardboard, old extracted speaker sets and a couple of tiny gas canisters.

While Grainger failed in his efforts to bring the machines to the public, Mills believes they speak to a particularly Australian streak of Grainger's identity: his willingness to be defined by his own curiosities rather than classical conventions.